A picture of Kalief Browder is seen at a rally in his honor Thursday.Gregory P. Mango

I grieve for Kalief Browder.

Trapped in a state of despair and paranoia, Kalief committed suicide this past Saturday, leaping from a second-floor window of his family’s Bronx home with an air-conditioner cord wrapped around his neck. He was a lost young man whom, ordinarily, I would never have heard about, much less cared about. Collateral damage in the grand opera of New York City.

He was 22 years old.

But I know one thing as certainly as I know that death will one day consume me, too: Kalief Browder did not deserve to die. Not now. Not like this.

Late at night, I lie awake imagining the torments Kalief must have suffered as he fell to oblivion. Did he think of his mother? Of the ladies he would never love? Of the jobs for which he would never be hired, the children he would never sire? In his final moments, did his mind race through the million little details of a future he would never see?

I believe that, in the instant between life and death, Kalief found peace.

I am angry.

Who will answer for this?

He was the youngest of his parents’ seven children, the younger five adopted. He was not a perfect teen, but he was not the worst.

In one run-in with police, when Kalief was 16 years old, an officer reported seeing him take a delivery truck for a joyride and crashing it into a parked car, according to a piece published last year in The New Yorker magazine.

Kalief insisted that he only watched as his friends drove the truck. But he pleaded guilty and was granted youthful-offender status by a judge, who sentenced Kalief to probation.

He could not have known this at the time, but Kalief was staring down death.

In May 2010, 10 days before Kalief’s 17th birthday, he and a friend were arrested after a man accused them of stealing his backpack and Kalief of striking him in the face, which led to Kalief being charged with robbery, grand larceny and assault.

His friend was not held behind bars. Although Kalief insisted he’d done nothing wrong, a judge set his bail at $3,000, a sum his parents were unable to raise, because he was on probation. After his indictment, another judge ordered him held without bail because of his probationary status. He was locked up in the vast city jail on Rikers Island — for three years — awaiting a trial that never came.

He was held in solitary confinement for about two years, punishment for fighting and other infractions, his lawyer Paul Prestia told me.

A security video from inside Rikers showed him being slammed to the ground and pummeled by a correction officer as his hands were cuffed behind his back. Another showed him being beaten by about 10 teen inmates.

He attempted suicide, said his lawyer, several times, once by trying to hang himself with a bed sheet he tore into strips, fashioned into a noose, and tied to a light fixture. Another, by smashing a plastic bucket and slicing his wrist with a shard.

A prosecutor offered him a deal allowing him to plead guilty to felonies in exchange for a sentence of 3½ years in prison, then 2 ½.

Then a judge offered to let him plead guilty to two misdemeanors and go free immediately.

In each case, he refused. He wanted to stand trial.

Then by 2013, the guy who’d accused Kalief and his pal of robbing him had returned to Mexico and could not be located by authorities.

Brooke Astor, who was left a fortune by her late third husband, William Vincent Astor, once derided Charlene as “that bitch’’ and “Miss Piggy’’ before the philanthropist died in 2007 at age 105.

The epic family drama ended with Anthony Marshall’s 2009 conviction for bilking his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mom’s estate out of millions in art, cash and other property, after his twin sons testified against him in Manhattan state Supreme Court. He died last year at age 90, but not before cutting his biological sons out of his will — each got $1 million, but had been promised $10 million — and leaving his fortune to Charlene and her kids from a previous marriage and her grandkids.

“Basically, we saved my grandmother and that was my goal. I would do it all again,” Anthony Marshall’s son Philip Marshall, told The Post.

Hip-hop hoo-vey for Five Cantors

You’ve heard of the Three Tenors? Here come the Five Cantors, a quintet of rapping, singing Hasidic Jews. They are to perform in a free concert at the SummerStage festival in Central Park June 16 as part of KulturefestNYC, which runs from June 14 to the 21st — an international showcase of Jewish performing arts.

They might lure me back into the synagogue.

Giant confession of a Mets fan

I’m a diehard fan of the New York Mets, which means I’ve suffered miserably over the years.

But Tuesday night, I was among many Met-lovers who did the unthinkable — I cheered for 27-year-old San Francisco Giants rookie pitcher Chris Heston. He threw a no-hitter, driving his team to a 5-0 victory over the Mets at home at Citi Field, becoming just the 22nd rookie in the modern era to throw a no-no.

The first was baseball Hall-of-Famer Christy Mathewson, in a 5-0 victory against the St. Louis Cardinals on July 15, 1901, pitching for the New York Giants — the team that transformed into the San Francisco Giants by moving to California in 1958.
Good for baseball. Great for the Giants. Fabulous for Heston.